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Presentation

I have just joined the department, after spending eleven years as a professor at the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa. I am overjoyed to see my interdisciplinary bent find a new terrain in communication and media studies and to start a new chapter teaching international communication, media studies, political communication, and popular culture at Université de Montréal.

I am first and foremost fascinated by the relationship between culture, science, media, technology and society, power/knowledge, militarization, and war and security in the US context and in the geopolitical frame set by globalization. My current work brings me to consider issues dealing with the security/mobility nexus and the redefinition of citizenship in the digital age. I conceive of communication to be at the heart of social, political, and economic relations and to go well with the evolution of media technologies whilst also epistemologically also a technology (being both content and form and dissemination and reception of a message).

Through communication, we are, consciously or unconsciously in relation with the world. I am heavily interested in our relationship with digital governance – and by extension, to digital media. I thus pay a particular attention to communication infrastructures in security governance, which leads me to study new forms of surveillance in the surveillance society enacted by the digital. As digital media and new media, algorithms are a privileged topic to capture the media infrastructures for the communications they infrastructurally embody as well as to what they make possible for media technologies governing subjects and controlling spaces.

Research expertise

In my research, I both mobilize communication and media studies, notably popular culture, cultural industries and cultural studies scholarship, as well as issues of mobility and surveillance, with a reflection that addresses power manifestations in communication and the effects of communications. As international communication, media cultures, political communication, popular culture, cultural studies, and new media studies constitute my main research expertise in media studies and communication, my work is well served by my interdisciplinary bent and undisciplined perspective that draws upon the fields of international relations, international political sociology, political geography, political anthropology, American studies, security studies, and science and technology studies.

Current projects

Policing North American Borderlands through the Security/Mobility Nexus: Of (Digital and Mobile) Borders, Infrastructures and Algorithmic Security (with Anthony Amicelle (School of Criminology, Université de Montréal)

Mobility Control in the Digital Age: The Everyday Securing of Human, Financial and Data Circulation (with a research team composed of Anne-Marie D’Aoust (Department of Political Science, UQAM), Anthony Amicelle (School of Criminology, Université de Montréal), and Mireille Paquet (Department of Political Science, Concordia University).

Imagining the Real/Reel World of Warfare: Technowar and the Militainment Complex: This research circumscribes the US technowar and militainment complex, and explores the cinematic, televisual, and videogame rendition of the national security state, along with its global consequences.

Screening war and surveillance on the small and big screen: a history of technologies of surveillance and media as forms of surveillance and aestheticization of surveillance in national security state fiction

Grondin, David (2011), “The Other Spaces of War: War Beyond the Battlefield in the War on Terror”, Geopolitics, vol. 16, no. 2, p. 253-79, 2011.

Grondin, David (2010), « The New Frontiers of the National Security State: The US Global Governmentality of Contingency », in Security and Global Governmentality: Globalization, Governance and the State, Miguel de Larrinaga et Marc Doucet (dir.), New York et Londres,